This is the problem, every team will have to give up huge pieces if not their entire team in order to win the trade battle.
This is the problem, every team will have to give up huge pieces if not their entire team in order to win the trade battle.
Nothing serious here; just family stuff and a follow-up to a discussion above.
SOFTBALL:
A while back some of us were talking about scoring baseball & softball games. I think I've earned my Youth Recreational League Scorekeeping Merit Badge by now. I scored all 14 games in my daughter's Spring softball league this year. Then I scored more than half of her Summer league games, too - perhaps another ten games. It's not hard, but one must pay attention when every pitch is about to be thrown until the play is over and not be distracted by the other parents sitting nearby who are fun to talk with otherwise.
She's on the Junior Varsity high school team now (for all of a week and a half), and has gone from being a big fish in small pond to a small fish in a big pond. At practices she's only played outfield so far. I laughed and told her that's exactly where they put freshmen and she's lucky be out there and not riding the pine in the dugout. I think she thought she'd show up and they'd make her the starting catcher on the Varsity team on her first day.
PARENTAL BOASTING ALERT: Yesterday, she played her first high school game and got two base hits in two at-bats and scored twice, also. She sat out for the first two innings* but then they put her in right field for the last two (they play a total of five). I thought that was a safe place to ride out her first game, since you can't make an error if the ball doesn't come your way. And it didn't.
*in softball, at least in Youth Rec and HS JV, nine players take the field but if there are more than nine players on the team at that game, they all get to bat. If there are 13 or 14 players at a game, they each won't get to hit as often as if there were only nine.
Here's her second of two base hits yesterday. This is a screen shot of an iPhone video. It's 2022 and I still don't know how to upload a video to the internet, so I just paused it at the best place I could find for a screen shot.
Her team won yesterday 20 - 3. Nothing like dishing out a savage beatdown to start the season off right!
BASEBALL:
Even though we have a major league team pretty close to home, we've attended a couple minor league games this summer and I hope we can squeeze in at least one more. We've seen the Rocky Mountain Vibes in Colorado Springs and the Northern Colorado Owlz play in Greeley. I have always enjoyed minor league games, if only because I lived two cities that only had minor league teams. Tickets are so cheap that they almost make up the for the cost of guzzolene.
$13.00 seats. The best seats cost $26 and the cheapest are just TWO dollars!
She chased down a foul ball that landed nearby.
$10.00 seats (general admission). The Owlz are playing their home games at the University Of Northern Colorado (they're the Bears) while their new stadium is being built.
Ready to catch more fouls, but none came our way. Her socks have a hand holding a pennant that says YOUR TEAM SUCKS.
GOLF: Tomorrow with my son at 2:00 PM. First time playing since the summer of 2019 and our first time playing 18 holes together instead of 9. I'm hoping to break 200.
First off, awesome for your daughter! Secondly, minor league baseball >>> major league baseball. That looks like a great time.
I like the everyone bats rule, good for the kids, good for the coach!
And great to hear that she did well!
Is scoring still pencil+paper?
I know cricket has mostly moved to digital. Our team usually "live scores" with updates pushed regularly (not every ball/pitch), so I can check scores if Im not playing (games are about 5 hours - so a few updates are good)
And yeah minor leagues is good - he says holding his Kane County Cougars ball in his hand! (Western Chicago)
Sure its not the big names, but good ball, affordable and generally not all the parking and crowds.
Yeah, Minor league ball is fun. The past few years in the desert, I've enjoyed going to a couple of Alpine Cowboys games for cheap entertainment and beer.
-Formerly Stabulator
As it turned out, her first game wasn't officially a game but a scrimmage, so everyone on each team got to hit. Now that the regular season has started, only the nine players currently assigned to a position in the field take a turn at bat.
At this level, yes. An example from yours truly is below.Is scoring still pencil+paper?
The high school fields have electronic scoreboards also that have lights to indicate balls, strikes, outs, inning, and runs, which is nice to this former scorekeeper. I assume whoever is controlling the board is also scoring the game, but I'm sure each team has someone scoring too.
It dawned on me this Saturday while watching both our Varsity and Junior Varsity teams win, including two more hits in two at-bats by my daughter, that a scoreboard helps prevent the parents/family from constantly asking the volunteer and often inexperienced scorekeeper for those details, and usually right after a bunch of stuff happens all at once and people aren't sure if they saw it all.
Let's say the other team is at bat. There are two outs with runners on first and third. The batter hits one into right field that lets the third base runner score. The first base runner is on her way to third as a wild throw from right field intended for second base goes into short left field. This encourages the runner at third to try for home and the batter to run from first to second. The third baseman picks up the ball that the shortstop at second couldn't catch (and the second baseman would have been in short right field then as the cutoff person) and thinks she can't make the throw to home in time. She throws the batter out at second instead.
Now we have two runs scored by girls with long hair that covers the numbers on the back of their jerseys as they run back to the dugout together with all the other girls who spilled out of the dugout to give high fives to their teammates. I'm pretty sure I know who those runners were but like to see the numbers anyway to be sure who scored (and I don't know the other team's girls on sight like I do ours). But, now players are running from the field to the dugouts and vice-versa. The ump is brushing off home plate and I'm trying to digest what just happened and was that second girl number 3 or number 8 and did that second run count but all I can hear is "what's the score?" or "how many was that?" from the spectators who aren't watching as closely as I am. Wait a minute, people...let me think here!
Something like that did happen in one game this summer. Before the game, coaches and/or scorekeepers exchange rosters with the batting order with names and players' jersey numbers. Well, I guess their coach was in a hurry and switched from jersey numbers to sequential numbers halfway through the list. So I got something like this from their team:
32 Agatha
19 Edith
27 Bertha
99 Temperance
41 Dorothy
6 Judith
7 Gladys
8 Mildred
9 Esther
And of course I didn't notice this until I was trying to figure out who just hit and got on first, since Judith's number wasn't on my list. To make things worse, something else was weird, such as Gladys actually having jersey number 7, making me think I had just missed a player somehow (or they did the ol' switcheroo and didn't tell anyone). I had to run over to the other scorekeeper not once but twice before we figured out what happened, since this stretched into another inning before she and I both realized what happened (she wasn't the coach but just another parent like me).
I photographed every page of the last two last seasons so I can figure out my daughter's batting stats, just for fun. I haven't done that yet, but here's the last game of her Summer league. We were ahead 8 to 7 after three, but they scored fifteen runs in the fourth inning and would have scored more if our coached hadn't invoked the Mercy Rule that says fifteen is the maximum number of runs a team may score in one inning. By that point, our time on that field was up so the game was over.
I think we reached a point in the 13 & 14 year old league where our pitchers were good enough to throw strikes (or at least balls that are hittable) and all the batters were getting good at hitting. The problem is the time when pitchers become accurate but still aren't throwing fast enough to make batters miss regularly. We had a pitcher who was throwing medium-speed strikes and of course the other team took full advantage of this. She left the field in tears in the fourth but got an ovation from both sides of the stands, which I thought was very good sportsmanship. She was just doing what the coaches had been telling her all season: "Throw strikes. Let them hit. Let the fielders make the outs." Well, fielding at this age is a whole 'nother ballgame when it comes to ability (and luck).
Interesting that it hasn't moved to computer scoring.
Both have a mix of very fixed actions but also needing to handle rare things and even mistakes.
Baseball stats has stuff like sacrifices, intentional walks etc.
But cricket has just a lot more entries - a Test match is limited to 5 days of 90 overs (each of 6 "pitches"). So a few thousand entries. Total score (both sides combined) is around 1,000. Highest ever is just under 2000.
The score book I would use needs a page per innings (most games are 1 innings per team, some are 2 per team). At the top level the books just aren't big enough!
One tough bit is "balancing the book" - making sure that the running total is the same as both the total of the batter and the bowlers (pitchers). Effectively the score is kept in 3 places and with scores over 100 it is easy to just miss an entry somewhere and bam it doesn't total.
Also at my schmuck level we dont have a dedicated scorer, its typically two people from the batting team. They will swap with others as they need to bat or just because they are bored for doing it for a couple of hours. Bored means mistakes! Typically they dont put in "outs" against a fielder - you leave that blank and the fielding team will fill that in at the end of the day.
The move to scoring on laptop/ipad took a while, but seems to be widely accepted. Its good that it automatically keeps the total - you only need to enter an action once and it goes in 3 places (batter, bowler, total). And cricket is big on tradition! So moving to a new system was a big thing for most people. I do think its easier for new scorers to learn the computer system than the pen+paper.
Trying to work out the sheet below... Im guessing the team batting won, batting second. So there is another sheet for the other team.
They also made a mistake putting the bowling summary in, they missed a line (the 3rd in purple). We dont use colour, but that can be handy if you want to see which batter scored off which bowler. Not a strict requirement but handy at higher levels for analysis. Also its automatically done by computer.
^ So much work there! I can see why it would take multiple people.
As a typical American who is completely ignorant of cricket, I have enjoyed hearing co-workers from India and a world-traveling friend from South Africa tell me (or groups of us at work at lunch, etc.) about the game. Usually it involves much laughter as none of it makes any sense to those who don't know the game.
I got into it for a bit when I was in Afghanistan. But I've probably forgotten everything by now.